using our brains to save yours

State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition

Hell yes, we’re making State of Decay for Xbox One!

Man, it felt good to write that. There’s a huge difference between “We think it’s a good idea and we’re seriously considering it”, and “Hell yes, we’re working hard on it right now.” It’s generally a good idea to wait until you can say “hell yes”, because until then, Things Can Change, but we’ve crossed that threshold for State of Decay on Xbox One.

State of Decay is coming to Xbox One via the State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition. While we’re still very much in development, here’s what I can tell you today.

First, we’re remastering the game in glorious 1080p, with sharper textures, a refined user interface, and more environment detail. We’re also taking advantage of the more powerful hardware by remastering and adding new environment effects, and increasing the fidelity and smoothness of character and zombie animations throughout the game. And along with these visual enhancements, we’ll ensure the game runs at a rock-solid frame rate and polish out a few glitches along the way.

Next, we’re creating some new content — not an entire DLC’s worth, but a few cool new mission types, new weapons, vehicles, and perhaps a hero or two. We’ll also be making some of your favorite characters from Lifeline (yes, Sasquatch) available as playable characters in Breakdown, and taking some of the new base options from Lifeline and making them available in Breakdown and the core State of Decay game. And then we’ll throw in half an hour of new music from State of Decay composer Jesper Kyd.

Finally, we’re bundling both Breakdown and Lifeline DLC releases into the game to create the ultimate State of Decay experience.

As of today we have the game up and running on Xbox One (and you may see some video of that coming out of our media announcement at the Lab last night, including this bit from Major Nelson), and it already looks fantastic, but we still have a long way to go to make the visual improvements worthy of Xbox One hardware. We’ll crank on that through the fall, and plan to release State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition, both digitally on Xbox One and PC/Steam, and at retail, in spring 2015.

For those of you who’ve played State of Decay, I know you’ll have lots of questions. Will my characters transfer over? What is the upgrade path for current players? Have the system specs for the PC changed? How much will it cost? I don’t have answers to these questions today, but rest assured we’re working on them, and I’ll let you know as soon as I can. What I can tell you is that we’re always aware the reason we have the opportunity to continue making State of Decay games is because of your support, and that will guide every decision we make.

This is the first of many planned next-gen steps for the State of Decay franchise. We’re working hard on Year One, but rest assured there are other, perhaps bigger, irons in the fire as well. I’ll let you know about those the moment I can say, “Hell yes!”